Most of the questions below get typed into a search bar late at night rather than asked out loud in a studio. That is the whole problem. The person best placed to answer them is a jeweller, and the reason you are not asking a jeweller is that you suspect the question marks you as someone who does not know how this is done.

So here is the thing worth knowing first: there is no authority on engagement ring etiquette. No standards body publishes it, no professional association enforces it, and the rules that feel most binding turn out to have the shortest and least impressive histories. The awkwardness is real. The rule you are trying not to break usually is not.

The sources here were checked on 18 October 2026: a doctoral dissertation on the De Beers advertising campaigns held at Auburn University, a catalogue record from the Archives Center at the National Museum of American History, an object record from the Victoria and Albert Museum, and ISO 8653:2016 as listed in the Standards Council of Canada standards database. Anything specific to a given studio is absent on purpose, because those are questions to put to the studio.

The Rule About Money Came from an Advertising Agency

The most common embarrassed question is about money, and it almost always arrives in the same shape: how much am I supposed to spend? The word doing the work there is supposed. It assumes a figure exists and that everyone else has already been told what it is.

Jennifer Pequignot's doctoral dissertation at Auburn University, Why a Diamond Means Forever: The Creation of the Diamond Engagement Ring Tradition in the United States, 1939-1996, traces the modern tradition to one sustained advertising programme — De Beers advertisements produced by the agency N. W. Ayer & Son — and dates the adoption of "a diamond is forever" as De Beers' official slogan to 1947. Pequignot's argument is that the campaign held because the agency kept rewriting it to match changes in the economy and in courtship.

The working papers are not folklore. The Archives Center at the National Museum of American History holds the N W Ayer Advertising Agency Records, and its catalogue lists, in Series 3, box 149, a black-and-white De Beers proof sheet dated around 1964 to 1966 and titled Diamonds bespeak an ever-growing love. The tradition you are trying to observe correctly has a box number.

What we are not going to tell you. You have probably heard that De Beers set the figure at two months' salary, or three. We went looking for a primary source for that number this run and did not find one we could stand behind, so it is not here. We are telling you that rather than quietly leaving a gap, because the gap is the interesting part.

If you want the longer version of the money question, we have written one: how much to spend on an engagement ring.

Engagement Ring Etiquette Has No Governing Body

It is not that standards are absent from jewellery. They exist, and they are precise. ISO 8653:2016, Jewellery — Ring-sizes — Definition, measurement and designation, is listed in the Standards Council of Canada standards database with a publication date of 14 January 2016. Its abstract says the standard "specifies a method to measure the ring-size using a ring stick with defined characteristics", a tool "mainly used during manufacturing steps", and that it "specifies the designation of the ring-size".

Read that again and notice what is being measured. The standard is about the ring. A note on the same record adds that between jeweller and customer the finger size is measured with a finger gauge set, matched to the same diameters and tolerances as the ring stick. Even then, the instrument is a tray of rings. The international standard for ring sizes describes an object you can put on a bench, not a person.

No equivalent document covers whether you may ask someone their ring size, who should be told first, or what you are permitted to do with a ring that came from a grandmother. Those questions have no technical committee.

History is no firmer. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a silver ring of the 15th century, recorded as possibly Italian, museum number 848-1871, with two bezels: a fede, the clasped-hands motif, and two hands holding a heart. The museum's own record declines to classify it, saying the ring was likely a love token, or perhaps a betrothal ring. Centuries on, with the object in the collection and a curator looking straight at it, the catalogue hedges. If the institution holding the ring will not say what the ring was for, the pressure you feel to get the modern version right is worth putting down.

Asking About Ring Size Is Not the Breach You Think It Is

The fear here is that asking, or getting someone else to ask, either spoils the surprise or signals that the proposal has become a committee project. It is not a question that will surprise anyone making the ring.

What helps is knowing which questions actually change the ring, as opposed to which ones only make you feel less exposed. These are the ones worth putting to whoever is making it:

• What happens if the size is wrong on the day? A good answer describes the design constraint — how much metal there is to work with, whether the band is set the whole way around — rather than offering a promise.
• How is the size being established, and with what instrument? A finger gauge set and a ring stick are the trade's tools. An answer that names them is an answer from someone who has done this.
• Does the design I am drawn to narrow my options later? Full eternity bands, deep engraving and certain band profiles are decisions about the future, made now.
• What do you need from me, and by when, for this to exist by the date I have in mind? Ask for the sequence rather than the total.

We have written separately on how to find your partner's finger size, and on choosing a ring together without ruining the surprise, which is the other half of the same anxiety.

The Questions We Are Deliberately Not Answering

Three of these questions are not etiquette questions at all. We are going to decline them rather than hand you a soft version.

Who keeps the ring if the engagement ends. That is a legal question. We are jewellers, not lawyers, and an answer from us would be worth nothing to you in the moment it mattered. Ask a solicitor.

What a deposit commits you to, and what happens if you change your mind. Anything we published here would be a statement about our own terms rather than about etiquette. It belongs in a conversation with the studio you are actually working with, in writing, before money moves.

Whether a ring can be traded in later for a larger one. This varies so completely between studios that a general answer would mislead you. Put it to the specific studio, early, before the design is settled.

Now the part that costs us something. We sell engagement rings, which makes us close to the last people you should take spending advice from, and the honest answer to the money question is one we would rather not give: there is no figure. Not a low one, not a sensible one, not a percentage of anything. Whatever number is sitting in your head, the useful question is where it came from — and we went looking for where, and came back without it. We would rather you spent less and liked the ring than spent more and told yourself a rule required it.

What to Do With All of This

The fair objection to everything above is that etiquette was never really about rules. It is about not embarrassing yourself in front of people whose opinion you care about, and pointing out that no technical committee governs proposals does not make that feeling go away. True enough. The feeling is the actual subject.

What changes is where the authority sits. If nobody outside the two of you is entitled to rule on it, the questions worth asking get narrower and more practical: what does this person already wear, what will survive their week, what can actually be made, and what has to be decided before anything is cut. Those are answerable questions, and they are the ones a jeweller is equipped to take.

Which is the last thing worth saying. You are allowed to not know. Everyone sitting on the other side of the bench learned this by being told.

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Laher is a bespoke jewellery studio in Surry Hills, Sydney. We design and handcraft engagement rings and fine jewellery using Australian sapphires and unique coloured diamonds.